1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic identifiers. More specifically, the present invention relates to storing and controlling access to public identifiers on a network.
2. Background of the Invention
A user today has many forms of identifiers that are made public in order for them to communicate with other users over a public network. These identifiers can be in many forms such as a telephone number (E.164 format), an email address (username@domain), application specific identifier (e.g., Skype address) or a social website address (e.g., URI).
With the introduction of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), a user can now have multiple public identifiers in their device. Each of these different public identifiers (PUIDs) may be registered with the public network depending on the specific identity that the user wishes to display or use. Independent of this, an application may wish to know the different identifiers of the user in order to blend these identities into a new service.
Today, IMS devices only register a single public user identifier, referred to in the 3GPP standards as the IMPU (IP Multimedia Public Identity). This identifier takes the form of “E.164 format number”@domain. The E.164 format number is the telephone number of the subscriber that other users use to communicate with the subscriber. This subscriber may also have other identifiers he uses to communicate with other persons (or objects) based on different communities in which he participates.
According to the latest standards, an IMS device will be able to support multiple identifiers for the subscriber (i.e., multiple IMPUs). However these standards are silent on how multiple IMPUs are to be used in a device. Separately, today's devices (and expected future devices) can support multiple applications which include downloaded third party applications. Some of these applications or services aim to access the subscriber's different identifiers and combine them into a new service. Various forms of these services are available today. One example might be a notification service for a package delivery application that first tries to call a user's home telephone for delivery time, and if no answer occurs, then an email notification is sent. For services such as these, the user must enter their multiple identifiers (in this example—home phone and email address) for each application they are accessing. If a new notification service is subscribed to (e.g., flight update), then the subscriber must reenter this information. For example, iTunes alone makes thousands of applications available to subscribers for download to their devices. Many of these applications are related to services which give the user an identifier. With this amount of applications available, users can quickly amass many identifiers.
What is needed is for these different identifiers to be discoverable by the device's various applications automatically without the subscriber having to individually type in multiple identifiers for each new application they download. An individual's identifiers may not necessarily be associated with a network, but the identifier can still be registered with that network.